Press Release

With Panorama, a new series comprised of mixed media works on panel and paper, the artist explores the traditional boundaries between painting and sculpture. He offers a vision of the world inspired – if not constrained - by contemporary technologies. Documenting personal researches on Berlin after World War II and, by extension, investigating the paradox of the human action which builds and destroys all together, the artist used softwares such as Google Earth to watch our world. The political dimension is essential in Enrique’s work : the formal erasement depicts destructions as much as a memorial vision of forgotten realities.

« Drawn to the intellectual spareness of abstraction and conceptualism, Enrique nevertheless uses a wide range of media – drawing, painting, silkscreen, monoprints, layered lifted images, sculpture and installation. And Enrique’s practice is very much concerned with materials – shaping wood, metal, paper, paint, epoxy, and resin into complex objects that undermine the ordinariness of their materials. These works are deliberate palimpsests - artworks whose history can be seen through the eroded exposure of under layers, visible by erasing, abrading, scraping and layering. The complex physicality of Enrique’s surfaces recalls ideas of age, decay, re-use, hidden images, and layers of meaning.Enrique’s work blurs the distinction between image and object, and between painting and sculpture. His paintings and sculptures are the culmination of decades of making art about ideas. They are part of Enrique’s art history – steps along a trajectory from conceptual projects and text-object works to paintings that resonate as culturally loaded signs. The polished complexity of Enrique’s paintings and the linear, snaking nature of his sculptures set up a tension between object and void. Their repetition when installed in groups owes much to the influence of minimalist work from a half century ago.These works explore the synthesis of opposites: controlled and spontaneous, rational and intuitive, represented and real, truth and fiction, permanent and ephemeral. They combine the purity of abstract visual experience with the primal exuberance of saturated color, glass-like glimmering surfaces, and flashes of metallic reflection. For all their beauty – whether deeply subsumed, layered and abraded paintings or twisting, attenuated painted sculptures – these artworks offer the viewer more than meets the eye. »